


Where the Air is Clear

by Eliyes



Category: X-Factor (Comics)
Genre: Depression, Gen, Past Torture, Suicidal Thoughts
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-09-26
Updated: 2013-09-26
Packaged: 2017-12-27 17:37:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 962
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/981736
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Eliyes/pseuds/Eliyes
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Rictor has a history of important milestones happening at great heights.</p>
<p>Lead in to the first page of <i>X-Factor (vol. 3) #1</i>.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Where the Air is Clear

**Author's Note:**

> This story was originally posted on the Livejournal community [RicStar](http://ricstar.livejournal.com/) on June 30, 2008.

 

Rictor had never been afraid of heights, even as a little kid. He never got vertigo. His cousins (especially Omar) were always big on testing their bravery, and when it came to climbing something, the only thing that would stop him was his mother watching. He used to sit on the roof and read (with a flashlight, if necessary), just to get some privacy when there was company, which there often was. It was from the rooftop that he planned his escape.

Fat lot of good it did him.

The skyscraper X-Factor had found him in -- he'd never known just how tall it was, having been smuggled in by the Right, drugged out of his gourd. He thought it must have been thirty storeys at least. They had broken him out of one of the Right's torture machines, but the medically-induced seizures hadn't stopped. They couldn't even get him into their helicopter because the vibrations would have shaken it apart.

Suspended by telekinesis above the skyscraper, in the throes of a Grand Mal seizure, Rictor nearly destroyed San Francisco. He would have, if not for Jean Grey. She used her power to stop his heart before he reached critical mass, so to speak: before he could destroy more than the one building with his power, and probably die from the seizure as well.

She stopped his heart, and then restarted it again, and it was a long while before he really accepted that second step as a good idea. However, it was a turning point, a sort of rebirth: his freedom from the Right. Physically, anyway. Mentally and emotionally, he was still their captive, bound by chains of terror.

Ironically, it took submitting to being their prisoner once again for him to start breaking those chains. Another turning point with nothing under his feet but air. That time he had been clinging to the twisted rungs of a broken ladder, with Cameron Hodge above, and below a pit that went so deep that the bottom was lost in shadows. He would've said it could have gone right down to Hell if he weren't sure that the Right's underground compound was itself a little piece of Hell. Considering Hodge was making deals with demons, he still didn't think he was wrong about that.

That time it wasn't his power that was the danger -- the Right had fitted him with a power-suppression helmet, leaving him disoriented, powerless, and terrified. No, he'd been left clinging to the precipice by his own attempt to escape, and if it had been just him, he would have let go. Death was preferable to being at Hodge's mercy again, in his opinion. Death -- but not murder. He didn't let go, in fact he let himself be recaptured, because he wasn't alone in dangling above that pit. While he held onto the ladder, Boom-Boom held onto _him_ , and even though he'd just met her, he couldn't ignore her pleas to not let go.

Dying to keep from killing thousands of strangers was easy compared to living to save just one girl. That decision changed him. It drew him out of the victim mentality he'd fallen into enough that he found it in himself to fight for escape with the others. He learned that there was power simply in protecting others. That, as much as anything, was at the core of why he did the mutant vigilante thing for so long.

And then M-day happened, and Rictor found himself among the lost and dispossessed. Now he could have the biggest, nastiest seizure in the world and the only one it would hurt was himself. Maybe once he would have been happy about that. Once he had wished his powers away, but that had been long ago, back when the Right told him that they wouldn't have bothered with him if he weren't a mutant.

In the years since then, he had grown comfortable with his powers. They had always been like some great and terrible beast he kept tightly leashed, and using them was an exercise in giving the leash some slack and not losing his grip, at least at first. Gaining control was akin to gaining confidence in the strength of his grip, and figuring out how much slack to give, when. Then it became more like teaching the beast to do tricks.

Losing control -- even as it became less likely -- had still remained one of his darkest nightmares. Now it wasn't an issue, and in a lot of ways that was worse. This wasn't _like_ being stuck in the Right's helmet, or a Genoshan inhibitor collar, because with those he could still feel the power inside, thrumming in his bones but inaccessible.

He felt _hollow_ now. He felt _sick_. The world around him just didn't feel the same; it didn't feel solid or _real_. Nothing did. It wasn't merely disorienting, it was _distressing_ , making it doubly hard to think -- over and above the confusion inherent in questions like "how the Hell did this happen?" and "what do I do _now?_ "

Trying to get over and above the confusion was how he wound up standing on a ledge at least a dozen storeys up. At least, he thought he remembered deciding to come up here to clear his head, but it wasn't as though the air was any fresher. He wasn't even up that high; not the tallest building in Mutant Town, and not even the top floor... but it was certainly high enough that he'd die if he were to impact with the street down there, that he could see, but not feel. He peered over he edge and wondered if this was enough of a turning point, or if he needed to get some air beneath his feet.

**Author's Note:**

> _But if somebody left you out on a ledge_   
> _If somebody pushed you over the edge_   
> _If somebody loved you and left you for dead_   
> _You gotta hold on to your time and break_   
> _Through these times of trouble_
> 
> "Times of Trouble" -- Temple of the Dog


End file.
